More effective prosecution of revealed corruption

Transparency Serbia followed cases where there was suspicion on corruption raised by independent state authorities, whistleblowers, investigative journalists or NGOs and further actions of the police and public prosecutors in that regards.

When investigative journalists followed such cases, TS provided insight on systemic problems that stayed behind the individual cases, systemic measures that should be conducted by relevant authorities.

At the very beginning of the project, TS contacted investigative journalists and media which deal with this topics and offered them assistance in selected stories/cases. Stories (cases) were selected according to several criteria - public interest, possible impact of the story and the case on population, impact of the story in order to reach goals set by the project, previous TS experience on the subject, actuality of the topic in the light of anti-corruption agenda and EU integration agenda.

TS advocated legal actions to be taken following investigative journalism stories. In order to accomplish this, TS addressed responsible authorities.

TS drafted report about monitored cases and follow up actions taken by the police and prosecution. TS also drafted recommendations with systemic measures that should be conducted by relevant authorities.

Finally, TS drafted final report with recommendations, analysis of all cases, systematic measures, and analysis of work of police and prosecution in the context of chapter 23 of Serbia/EU negotiations.

TS promoted project findings and results on press conference, in press issues, on social networks. Final findings were presented at the press conference in 9^th month of the project, on December 20th. According to TS’s press clipping, there were 46 news following this presentation.

TS analysed Action plan for chapter 23, reports on their implementation and produced overall conclusions on quality of AP 23 measures, activities, indicators, reporting results. Furthermore, we produced the list of concrete measures to improve current version of the AP and informed relevant stakeholders about it.

When it comes to the results of reorganization of public prosecution and court offices after March 1^st 2018, TS made effort to collect information from all offices in charge, with partial success. While some of them provided copies of indictments other refused to do so, by invoking various reasons (alleged secrecy of documents, alleged request of “too many” documents or inability to provide access due to lack of documents in public prosecution office. We also collected all available information on prosecution and court statistics in years before the project and during the project implementation. We did not identify any improvement over the time, but even some negative tendencies, through decreased number of final criminal charges, indictments and verdicts in 2012/2017 period, and increased number of verdicts in 2018 due to controversial “plea bargaining” practice.

Izveštaj: Ka efikasnijem procesuiranju obelodanjenih sumnji na korupciju - finalni

Ka efikasnijem procesuiranju obelodanjenih sumnji na korupciju - sažetak, decembar 2018

Tabela: Postupanje tužilaštva za organizovani kriminal i Višeg javnog tužilaštva u Novom Sadu

Kada se suoče sa aferama i problemima, predstavnici vlasti najčešće izbegavaju odgovor i odgovornost porukom da nadležne organe treba pustiti da na miru rade svoj posao. Transparentnost Srbija (TS) je na nekoliko desetina primera dokumentovala kako to organi (ne) rade svoj posao. U dva tekstu objavljena na portalu Peščanik prikazano je nekoliko primera:

https://pescanik.net/pustite-nadlezne-organe-da-rade-svoj-posao/

https://pescanik.net/nadlezni-organi-i-dalje-rade-svoj-posao/

Tužilaštva - (ne)postupanje i inicijative TS: